I inherited my love of food from my dad. Not just food as sustenance, but food as a love language.
My first contacts with real Syrian food came through him.
He was the one who taught me that if you can’t cook with love, then don’t cook at all. He was my example of the perfect host. He didn’t simply cook for people. He genuinely delighted in having them around his table. He had this mother-hen energy that made you feel genuinely welcome in his home without guilt-tripping you into a food coma.
That subconsciously became my blueprint in everything food-related.
So you can imagine my shock when I started noticing that the fridge in his Warsaw home looked empty. I say looked, because it was not technically devoid of food, it just looked underpopulated.
The first time it happened, I assumed that he had been back from a long trip and had not had time to restock the fridge. But since I would stop by his apartment several times every week, I began to notice a pattern: the foods were almost always the same! A couple of tubs of commercial salads (the very mayonnaise-y type). A few fruit yoghurts. A block of yellow cheese and dark chocolate with nuts. That was IT.
I remember thinking: “This isn’t the fridge of a Syrian!”
Our fridges are supposed to be abundantly stocked and bursting with variety. They change with the seasons. They cater to every mood.
Even the meals he cooked for himself were becoming just as limited.
I tried to inquire in the most diplomatic way I could think of. Dad was a very proud man, and picking on his fridge or cooking repertoire was not likely to go down well.
He didn’t take offence. In fact, he seemed happy to explain his line of thinking:
“I found foods I enjoy. I found brands I trust. I don’t want to spend my time deciding what to eat.”
His logic was that every unnecessary decision consumed a little bit of his attention, and he’d rather save that attention for things that mattered more.
At the time, I thought that he was taking his recent obsession with efficiency too far.
At first it was him adopting the mantra from famed French architect Le Corbusier: a house is a machine for living. Now he was turning his kitchen into a life-support machine!
The man who had taught me to love food seemed to have stripped all spontaneity out of his own daily eating habits.
He obviously still loved to eat well. He bought good-quality ingredients. Sought out good restaurants. So obviously he still enjoyed eating. It was the constant need to choose that he was done with.
His logic became even more obvious when I was invited to tag along for his weekly grocery trips.
Every Tuesday we’d go to Carrefour in Arkadia because it was Seniors’ Day. We’d go together and get the discount on our combined shopping.
Our shopping MO was very different. I’d wander the aisles comparing products, looking at special offers and what was new, while Dad already had his shopping list on his phone and he stuck to it like it was a holy commandment.
No detours.
No temptation.
No second-guessing.
This was a man on a mission!
Years later, people started talking about decision fatigue. Steve Jobs with his black turtleneck. Mark Zuckerberg with his grey T-shirts. Suddenly there was a name for something my father had figured out long before it became fashionable.
He had simply decided that some decisions were no longer worth making.
And as with almost everything else, it took me several years to see the wisdom in his approach.
Privately, I still struggle with shopping and cooking for us at home. My son seems to have independently arrived at his grandpa’s solution of sticking to a few trusted foods.
“Mum! Why did you even buy something we hadn’t tried before?” has become a frequent refrain.
But when it comes to Dervish Kitchen, I came round to my dad’s logic very quickly.
My first instinct when I decided to open a food business was that I’d need to create a constantly changing menu with seasonal dishes and new specials every week.
Instead, the realities of a micro food business forced me to change course right from the start: I found myself building a small repertoire and repeating it again and again. There were practical considerations, of course, but above all it was because repetition has its own rewards.
The more often I made a dish, the better I got at making it. I learned where to source the best ingredients, how to improve the recipe, how to streamline the preparation, and how to reduce waste without compromising quality. I made the same dishes over and over until they became the best versions I could produce. Some dishes disappeared from the menu after a season or two. Others became fan favorites and simply became nonnegotiable.
And just like that, reliability became my trademark.
Now my weekly procurement list looks very much like the list Dad had on his phone. But the home food shopping? Still as chaotic and unpredictable as those days when I used to roam Carrefour with Dad.
